Gives synoptic presentations of speech data in their cultural and social contexts

This book aims to explain social variation in language, otherwise the meaning and motivation of language change in its social aspect. It is the expanded and improved 2nd edition of the author’s self-published volume with the same title, based on revised and adapted posts on the author’s Language Lore blog.

Each vignette calls attention to points of grammar and style in contemporary American English, especially cases where language is changing due to innovative usage. In every case where an analysis contains technical or recondite vocabulary, a Glossary precedes the body of the essay, and readers can also consult the Master Glossary which contains all items glossed in the text.

The unique form of the book’s presentation is aimed at readers who are alert to the peculiarities of present-day American English as they pertain to pronunciation, grammar, and style, without “dumbing down” or compromising the language in which the explanations are couched.

Praise for the First Edition

“Michael Shapiro is one of the great thinkers in the realm of linguistics and language use, and his integrated understanding of language and speech in its semantic and pragmatic structure, grammatical and historical grounding, and colloquial to literary stylistic variants is perhaps unmatched today. This book is a treasure to be shared.” Robert S. Hatten, The University of Texas at Austin

“Jewel of a book. . . . a gift to us all from Michael Shapiro. Like a Medieval Chapbook it can be a kind of companion whose vignettes on language use can be randomly and profitably consulted at any moment. Some may consider these vignettes opinionated. That would be to ignore how deeply anchored each vignette is in Shapiro’s long and rare polyglot experience with language. It could well serve as a night table book, taken up each night to read and reflect upon ––to ponder––both in the twilight mind and in the deeper reaches of associative somnolence. There is nothing else like it that I know of.” James W. Fernandez, The University of Chicago

About the author

Michael Shapiro, Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Semiotic Studies at Brown University, was born in 1939 in Yokohama (Japan) and grew up speaking Russian, Japanese, and English. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1952 and was educated in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. His career as a teacher and scholar spans over half a century. He has taught at several universities, including the University of California (Los Angeles and Berkeley) and Princeton, and served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 1991. He is the co-author, with his late wife the medievalist and Renaissance scholar Marianne Shapiro, of Figuration in Verbal Art (1988) and The Sense of Form in Literature and Language (2nd ed., 2009).

Contributors

Resources

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Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce's name

Pronounced/pɝːs/."Peirce", in the case of C.S. Peirce, always rhymes with the English-language word "terse" and so, in most dialects, is pronounced exactly like the English-language word "purse". Also see "Note on the Pronunciation of 'Peirce'", The Peirce [Edition] Project Newsletter, v. 1, #3/#4, Dec. 1994.

Producers of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce, A Chronological Edition (ongoing) and The Essential Peirce vol. 2. Online gratis: some Peirce writings, various study aids (such as the Robin Catalog, see further down in this sidebar) & Peirce-biographical introductions:

Peirce's texts online

"The Categories" (PDF 177 KiB) MS 403. A later version by Peirce of most of his 1867 paper "On a New List of Categories", interleaved by RANSDELL with the original 1867 "New List" itself for comparison.

Books and Journal Issues about Pragmatism:1990-1999, 2000-2009, often with tables of contents from anthologies and journal issues.

The Metaphysical Club. Brief account plus bibliographies of the individuals. Charles Peirce, William James, Chauncey Wright, along with Nicholas St. John Green (the "grandfather of Pragmatism") & Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

PORT images of Peirce's manuscripts. If you try to save an image but your program seems to give you the sole option of saving it as a .bmp file (which could be huge), try typing the filename including the ".jpeg" extension into the "save as" field.

Gone but unforgotten by the Wayback Machine

Many of the links in the stored old pages lead successfully to other stored old pages (including stored old versions of pages that are still maintained and findable on the Internet). Links to stored high-resolution photo images are a bit spotty sometimes and one may need to visit more than one stored version of the given page in order to find a working link to a given stored photo image.

PORT photo images of Peirce manuscripts. UPDATE: Tepfenhart's home page is back at its old URL and anyway the images are also at GEP. But I'll keep these Wayback Machine links here "just in case". Update's end.

Bill Tepfenhart's Home Page. Photo images of Peirce's manuscripts. Some of the images are around 20MB. I saved one and, for some reason, my computer gave me the sole option of saving it as a .bmp file (and that would have been hundreds of MBs!), but I just typed the old filename including its extension (.jpeg) into the popup window and was able to save it properly.